my throat. I have a very clear visual image of the scene; I see distinctly four persons holding me down. What I see most clearly is a glowing brazier in which two red-hot irons were being heated to a white heat; and to this moment I still seem to feel that burning iron coming to my lips."
There is still one other group of images—the emotional ones. Our inquiry confirms the results obtained by M. Ribot on the remembrance of the feelings.[1] Some persons who know that they had a particular emotion do not feel it, but can only describe it. Others, on the other hand, still feel the emotion they had when a child. "My first recollection," says one, "was the astonishment I felt one morning at seeing the roofs without snow upon them. I thought they must be white all the year round, and I conceive now very clearly my surprise when I found that they were not. I was then three or four years old" "My first recollection" says another, "is of the birth of a sister. We received the news by letter, and I remember the details clearly. My father read the letter aloud, and I was very much struck with the name given my little sister—Hortense—it sounded queer. Every time I recall this memory, I witness the scene precisely in all its details, but that name, Hortense, especially, resounds in my ear, and I conceive a kind of echo of the singular impression it made on me. I was exactly two years eight months and a half old"
Our inquiry did not include the accuracy of these impressions, but several of our correspondents voluntarily communicated their verifications of them. One had frequent recollections of a modern balcony extending from the first floor of a country house, protected by a wooden balustrade, coming more commonly in dreams than when awake, and which he was not able to connect with anything real. When about fifteen or sixteen years of age, he passed through a village which his parents had left when he was two years old, and which he had never seen afterward. Everything was strange to him till he came to the balcony of his dreams. He asked what house that was, and found that it was the one his parents had lived in. Another person, who had left his natal village when three years old, returning to it when twenty, recognized the place and the former house of his parents.
In another case, where the recollection proved not quite exact, the subject remembered the death of his father as having occurred in a certain room, but learned afterward that that was not the room in which his father actually died, but one they had moved into afterward.
- ↑ M. Ribot. Psychologie des Sentiments. Chapter headed Remembrance of the Emotions.
